-As reported everywhere Daniel Alfredsson will play tonight.  Ian Mendes Tweets that Jakob Silfverberg thinks he’s playing tonight (Paul  MacLean was cagey in confirming it), which makes me think Mark Stone and Bobby Butler will come out of the lineup (speculation on my part).

–Michael Grange writes about how Jason Spezza is constantly criticised no matter what he does.  Grange points out that Spezza‘s numbers over his career are excellent and compare well with other elite players.  The whole article is worth reading and I highly recommend it.

–Joy Lindsay talked to Tim Murray about Binghamton’s season.  He discussed a number of things, saying that injuries and the lack of a #1 defensemen hurt the team.  In terms of signing veterans:

I think certainly at least one veteran defenseman, and certainly one or two veteran forwards. Up front, we do have a lot of bodies, and it may be hard to get two or three vets, but certainly one top-end one would be nice, and another complementary guy would be what we’d be looking for. But you have to think that the young guys that have been there a year or two years that don’t make our team next year, at some point you’ve got to consider them vets. I don’t think playing in the league seven years is the criteria for being a veteran. I think that after you’ve played 100 games in that league and were somewhat successful on an individual basis, we should be able to count on good, important minutes from those players.

When talking about the development of players he singled out Mike Hoffman and David Dziurzynski and implied Andre Petersson and Stephane Da Costa would be back in Binghamton next year.

-Apparently season series sometimes do mean something, at least in the case of Pittsburgh-Philadelphia.  Despite holding all the overall statistical advantages the Penguins were no match for the Flyers.  As I mentioned in my prediction (an incorrect prediction, as with almost everyone else I picked Pittsburgh), I’m not a fan of Marc-Andre Fleury and he set a record for the worst save percentage (.834) for playoff goalies who played at least six games.  The teams combined for 56 goals (30 for the Flyers, 26 for Pittsburgh), which is vintage 1980s hockey and has to scare the hell out of whoever faces the Flyers in the second round.  Only two games were close (games one and five) with the rest being blowouts.

This article is written by Peter Levi, be sure to follow @eyeonthesens